Fedora Weekly News Issue 144

In this issue we cover the upcoming plans for North America Fedora Ambassador Day, update the happenings across the Fedora Planet, report on numerous work towards Fedora 10 in artwork, internationalization and reports on FUDCon 2008 in Brno, Czech Republic and Linux Demo Day in Charleston, SC USA.

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page[1].

Fedora 10 feature owners--rescue your unfinished feature pages!

John Poelstra reminded[0] everyone that the feature freeze for Fedora 10 is coming soon, and that feature owners need to get their pages updated to ensure that the features that belong in F10 get in, and that the features that need to be deferred to F11 are deferred. "Please complete this as soon as possible so that we can prepare an accurate beta release announcement. FESCo will also be reviewing the complete feature list at its next meeting on Wednesday, September 17, 2008, and determining which incomplete features should remain."

Fedora 10 and translations: String freeze and repackaging

Dimitris Glezos reminded[2] us "that shipped packages for which Fedora is upstream for are string frozen since the Beta freeze of September 11: no translatable strings can be added or modified for Fedora 10."

Fedora intrustion update

Paul Frields issued[3] his latest updated regarding the Fedora security breach that has been news during the past few weeks. "Work on the Fedora infrastructure has returned to normal at this point. Updates are once again available for Fedora 8 and Fedora 9, our current releases, using the new package signing key we've implemented."

Planet Fedora

Tech Tidbits

Warren Togami announced the creation of a new list for NSPluginWrapper. "NSPluginwrapper Development discussion with the goal of isolating issues and collaboratively working on solutions should go on this list. There was some interest from other Linux distributions and even Adobe to cooperate on the future of nspluginwrapper development."

Greg DeKoenigsberg is helping the OLPC folks recruit volunteers to be part of their growing infrastructure team. "OLPC builds a lot of packages. They are looking to set up and maintain an infrastructure that will allow them to meet their own unique packaging needs. They need a volunteer with a strong understanding of the Fedora packaging process -- one who either understands koji now, or can learn to understand it in fairly short order."

My favorite Planet post this week comes from Fedora Board member Matt Domsch, and it is worth people's time to read the entire post, to gain a lot of insight into how Fedora's mass rebuilds work, and what triggers them.

"One challenge to self-hosting a project the size of Fedora (now with about 6200 source packages) is dealing with the interdependencies between packages. When a major component, such as the compiler or an often-used library, upgrades to a new version, you should rebuild all packages that depend upon that major component, to ensure they continue to work. Often, simply re-compiling or re-linking each package using the updated compiler or library is all that is needed. In some cases though, applications which once built, no longer do - bitrot has set in."

Legal

Tom Callaway wrote a lengthy post about the Mozilla EULA controversy, which reared its head again this week in the context of Ubuntu and Mozilla. However, Fedora dealt with this problem several months ago, at the end of the Fedora 9 release cycle.

Spot's entire post is worth reading, as is the commentary that follows it. Here is one excerpt:

"[The] goal was always to ensure that we could walk away with license terms from Mozilla that:

1. Permitted Fedora to continue using the Firefox trademarks
2. Clearly upheld the MPL as the valid software license terms for the Firefox binaries and source (not just for Fedora, but for everyone)
3. Meet the criteria for Free Software
4. Are presented to the user in a non-obtrusive, non-clickthrough agreement way"

Events & Ambassadors

The North American Fedora Ambassador Day is coming up at Ohio Linux Fest in October, and there were a few posts about it on Planet this week. Brian Powell gave an update on the organization, saying:

"There have been quite a few discussions and meetings recently in regards to FAD planning. There has been a lot of good progress and great ideas coming out of these. With time getting close, we are looking at finalizing the Agenda and Schedule for FADNA shortly.

If you are a North American Ambassador I would ask that you take a moment to look at what we have come up with so far and a 'tentative' schedule of events located at the FADNA2008 wiki page. If you have anything to add feel free to do so."

Additionally, Karsten Wade wrote a post about strategies for handling remote meetings, and making a physical gathering of a small number of people into a larger meeting that remotees can attend and still get value out of, whether that attendance is via IRC, telephone, or something collaborative like gobby.

"Think about your sessions and how it can help to interact with the rest of us. I recommend a minimum of: live video feed, live audio feed, and IRC, Gobby, and wiki editing projected on the wall. We can also keep a VoIP conference room open, but my instinct is to limit the flow on the incoming voices by subject matter. Beyond that recommendation, a live IRC and wiki-based abd/or Gobby note taking with many laptops in the in-person session is the bare bones, with regular usage of talk.fedoraproject.org."

David Nalley wrote up a trip report for Linux Demo Day in Charleston, SC. "About 60 people showed up. Charleston’s LUG is relatively new, and this was their first event. They seemed very pleased. I handed about 30 LiveCDs out and talked with a number of Fedora. In addition I spoke to 2-3 people who were intrigued with contributing to Fedora in one way or another. I’ll be following up with these individuals." This is a great example of an event -- low cost, but high touch!

Translation

14th October 2008 declared as the Package Translation deadline for Fedora 10

The last date of submission of translations for Fedora 10 packages has been announced as 14th October 2008 (Tuesday).[1] This announcement was made after an unanimous decision by the Fedora L10n Steering Committee (FLSCo) members. The last date for the translation of Documents remains as 21st October 2008 (Tuesday).

A request for rebuilding of packages post the translation freeze date, was also made to the Fedora-Devel-Announcement List.[2]

"Maintainers of the above packages need to put a reminder to issue a new build *later* than this date and before the Development Freeze of 21/10. The closer to the development freeze the rebuild takes place, the better for our translators. If you have not received any translations since the last build, a rebuild is not necessary."

Removal of old projects from fedorahosted.

susmit shannigrahi writes for fedora-infrastructure-list[2]

Susmit reminded the list that, Fedora has a policy to remove _any_ hosted projects that are
not altered or updated for last six months. And provided a list of projects, which falls into this category and they will soon be removed.

Artwork

Near to the Echo

Pursuing the declared goal of having the new Echo icon theme ready to be used as a default in Fedora 10, Martin Sourada and Luya Tshimbalanga continued the development and posting updates[1], [2], gathering feed-back and improvement proposals on @fedora-art. Martin even created an animated demo "also prepared animated gif (slideshow) [3] so you can see all the icons in one batch" and blogged about it.

Freedom for a game

Nicu Buculei relayed[1] to @fedora-art a request from the Hans deGoede, of Games SIG fame: the Project: Starfighter game[2], which used to be included in Fedora, was discovered of having some non-free graphic files and need free replacements to be re-included. Erick Henrique offered[3] his help "I go to unpack the archive starfighter.pak and to study a form of I redesign everything in a new style" and Hans promised[4] to code a needed utility "About recreating the .pak file I need to write a little utility for that, hopefully I'll have time for that this weekend."

Infrastructure change for Fedora Art

After an IRC consultation with Mairin Duffy, Martin Sourada proposed[1] using fedorahosted.org services for the Art team "it might be worth setting up a fedorahosted.org instance for the Fedora Art Team. Primary purpose would be to host our release graphics, but it could serve other purposes as well (e.g. using ticket system for design service come to my mind)", an initiative received with open arms by Luya Tshimbalanga and with some skepticism[3] by Ian Weller "I'm personally all for the idea, but I knew there were some caveats that
we should definitely look into before we even think about proceeding. I'd also like to see Mo's input, of course." and Nicu Buculei[4] "I am strongly against something which would raise the barrier to entry, so a NO-NO would be to require git to upload sketches (proposals) for the upcoming release."